Category: news

Students from Shorefields Technology College in Liverpool have helped a group of over-65s about using the internet as part of First Click – a BBC initiative to help get senior citizens online.

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Campaigners welcome the Pope’s comments that the use of condoms may be acceptable in exceptional cases, to prevent the spread of HIV.

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Fears are growing for the safety of two Britons among the 29 men missing after an explosion in a New Zealand coal mine as rescuers remain unable to enter.

Peter Roger, 40, and Malcolm Campbell, 25, are from Scotland, the Foreign Office confirmed.

David Cameron and Prince William have both contacted New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key offering support.

There are fears of a second explosion at the West Coast’s Pike River mine after tests showed gas levels rising.

Mr Roger, a former Perth Grammar pupil, emigrated to New Zealand two years ago to be closer to his mother and sister who live there, according to the Courier newspaper.

He was formerly an offshore oil engineer.

Gary Fraser, a friend of Mr Roger, told the BBC he was a “strong character” and that this was the second time he had been trapped in recent months.

The parents of Mr Campbell, from St Andrews in Fife, said they had to keep hoping for good news.

In an interview broadcast on STV News, his father Malcolm said: “We can’t concentrate on anything, we can’t sleep because it’s difficult.

“Our prayers and thoughts go out to everybody who is going through this in New Zealand. We just keep hoping that everything will be fine.”

The miner is due to marry his fiancee, Amanda Shields, 23, on 18 December.

There has been no contact with the miners since an explosion around 1530 local time (0230 GMT) on Friday.

A Foreign Office spokesman said both the UK miners are residents in New Zealand and their families had been offered consular assistance.

Prince William’s message came in the form of an email.

A Clarence House spokesman explained: “William has been to New Zealand on several occasions and is very fond of the country. He wanted to send a message of support.”

UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who is in Lisbon for the Nato summit, is being kept informed of developments, Downing Street said.

“Clearly he is deeply concerned about the appalling situation there. Clearly we stand ready to provide any assistance that is required,” a spokeswoman said.

The PM has sent a text message to his New Zealand counterpart John Key, which read: “I am thinking and praying for the best. I will make sure our diplomatic team help in any way they can”.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said the British high commission in New Zealand was working with the New Zealand authorities to help to contact relatives locally and in the UK.

“It is a very worrying situation and we will do our utmost to assist,” he told Sky News.

Tests showed an underground fire was burning at the mine, the company’s chief executive Peter Whittall said.

“Samples we took do indicate that we’ve got a heating of some sort underground, that means that there’s some combustion of material generating the gases that go with that,” he said.

The missing workers range in age from a 17-year-old – believed to be on his first shift – to a 62-year-old.

Each miner carried 30 minutes of oxygen, enough to reach oxygen stores in the mine that would allow them to survive for several days, officials from Pike River Coal, the mine operator, said.

Andrew Watson of the Mines Rescue Service, in the UK, said rescue efforts would be frustrated by fears for the safety of the rescuers themselves.

He said the trapped men would have been “trained to barricade themselves into somewhere where they are safe”.

To let rescuers know they are still alive, he said the best way would be to “hit solid strata”. Above ground a listening device, called a geophone, would detect that signal, he said.

The natural hazards associated with coal mining include the build-up of methane and the risk of spontaneous combustion.

With an explosion inside a mine, transport, communication, ventilation and the means to monitor conditions inside the mine would be disrupted or lost, Mr Watson said.

This means monitoring is restricted to very close to the mine surface. “They won’t have enough confidence in the information they’re getting to deploy the [rescue] teams,” he said.

The mine, which employs some 150 people, has been operational since 2008 and runs deep under the Paparoa Ranges on the rugged western coast of the South Island.

Of the 29 men, 16 are local employees, while 13 are contractors. Two are thought to be Australian.

An electrician went into the mine at 1550 local time to investigate a power failure, and 1,500m (4,920ft) into the shaft he discovered the driver of a loader who had been blown off his machine. He then raised the alarm.

Mining experts said it could have been an explosion of methane gas, coal dust, or a combination of the two.

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Shadow home secretary Ed Balls has said Labour may be ready to back coalition moves to cut the pre-charge detention period for terror suspects to 14 days.

In a major policy shift, he said he could support changes if they did not impede police and security services.

Mr Balls told the Sunday Telegraph Labour’s reputation had suffered from its attempts in government to raise detention times to 90 and then 42 days.

The coalition has also said it wants to review control orders.

Home Secretary Theresa May announced a review of counter-terror legislation in June, when she said her personal view was that the limit should be 14 days, which the Liberal Democrats also support.

The review, overseen by former director of public prosecutions and Lib Dem peer Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, is still under way.

It is also considering the issue of control orders – introduced under 2005 anti-terrorism legislation – which Mr Balls said he was also prepared to see scrapped if there was a workable alternative.

Ministers sign an order to place a terrorism suspect under close supervision that some say is similar to house arrest.

The government said at the time that it still needed a mechanism which would allow it to control the lives of some suspects whom it said it could not prosecute because of the rules over the use of secret intelligence in trials.

In 2005, under prime minister Tony Blair, Labour tried to raise the time terror suspects could be held without charge to 90 days – resulting in Mr Blair’s first Commons defeat as PM.

MPs later voted to extend the period from the then limit of 14 days to 28 days.

There was a further attempt to raise it to 42 days under Gordon Brown, in 2008, but the plan was heavily defeated in the House of Lords, and then abandoned.

Mr Balls admitted in the Sunday Telegraph interview that those attempts got the balance wrong between protecting the UK from the risks of terrorist attacks, and preserving democratic freedoms.

Mr Balls told the paper: “Even 42 days was a step too far. Our reputation as a party which protected liberty as well as security suffered as a result.

“Our approach should always be that if the evidence shows we can go down from 28 days without impeding the police and security services from doing their jobs, then we ought to do it.”

On control orders he said: “They are such exceptional measures that in an ideal world of course we would want to manage without them,” he said.

On both issues Mr Balls’ final stance will depend on the evidence of the police and the security services to the government’s review, he said.

He made clear his intention to move away from what was seen by some critics as an authoritarian approach under Mr Blair and Mr Brown.

“In government, I’ve no doubt that my Labour colleagues did their best on every occasion to get that balance right in the face of the real and dangerous threats against the country, but did we always succeed? Probably not.”

This change of heart is likely to go down well among Labour’s supporters – many of whom regarded the detention time limits as draconian, said BBC political correspondent, Gary O’Donoghue.

Civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch said the government should now debate whether to go lower than 14 days.

Director Alex Deane said: “This is good news. It means that there is simply no excuse for the government to keep the limit at 28 days – even the authoritarian Labour Party which introduced 28 detention now agrees that it’s wrong.”

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An international summit opens in Russia with leaders aiming to agree moves to double numbers in the wild.

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Business Secretary Vince Cable has denied breaking promises on university fees, insisting the Lib Dems’ pledge to oppose any rise was not binding.

Signing such a pledge on fees before the election might have been the wrong “political judgment”, he acknowledged.

But Mr Cable told BBC1’s Politics Show coalition plans to lift the ceiling on tuition fees to £9,000 did not indicate his party was untrustworthy.

Labour has attacked the Lib Dem U-turn, which provoked angry student protests.

Thousands of people took to the streets of London for a demonstration earlier this month, which flared into violence when a 2,000-strong section of the march broke off to confront police and attack the Conservative party headquarters.

The National Union of Students has also vowed to “chase down” any Liberal Democrat MPs who vote in favour of allowing universities in England and Wales to increase fees from the current cap of £3,290.

Many had publicly signed a pre-election pledge to vote against any such rise, should they be elected in May.

But Mr Cable insisted his party had not betrayed anybody and that the coalition agreement struck with the Tories was their only binding commitment.

“We didn’t break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn’t win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it’s the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I’m trying to honour,” he said.

Asked whether it would have been better if he had not signed the pledge, he added: “From the point of view of political judgment it may well have been, but it’s not an issue of trust.

“We and the Conservatives separately made a whole series of commitments in our manifesto and outside it.

“We haven’t been able to carry all of them through, partly because we have a coalition and have had to make compromises and partly because we’re still in the middle of this appalling financial situation.”

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was bombarded with parliamentary questions on the subject earlier this month.

Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman quoted him as having previously said that increasing tuition fees to £7,000 a year would be “a disaster” and described the new stance as “shameful”.

Mr Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, insisted the coalition’s policy – due to take effect from 2012 – was fair and that graduates who earned the least would pay less than currently.

However, he has admitted that he “should have been more careful” about signing the pledge in common with other Lib Dem MPs.

Amid expectations of further protests on Wednesday, Mr Cable told the BBC that many of those involved did not grasp what the government was proposing.

“It doesn’t actually affect them – we’re talking about a system of graduate contribution that will only affect people who start going to university in a couple of year’s time,” he said.

“If they are concerned for the next generation what I think they do need to understand is that we’re making the system significantly fairer, making it much more attractive for part-time students and for graduates on low incomes.”

To watch the Vince Cable interview and catch up with the week’s events at Westminster, see the Politics Show on BBC1 at 1200-1305 GMT.

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Latvian women lured to Ireland by false promises

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